[toomanytoys2]

Let me start this thread my saying - NEVER EVER ASSUME ANYTHING. It's been awhile since I have been here and my poor HH had sat for a little over a year. Well it came time for our annual week in the desert, so I pulled out the HH to make sure it was ready. 1st discovery was the carb was shot (damn Ethanol), so I picked up the quickest carb I could get, and also a manual petcock. It ran good for about 20 minutes, then it would hardly run. I checked the spark numerous times - nice and blue and could even hear it crack, so I wasted about 5 hours playing with the new carb and checking the coil and CDI. To make a long story short, I had about given up and the HH wasn't going to make the trip, but at a spur of the moment, I remembered that my wife's dirt bike used a very similar spark plug. Swapped it out - and success. I have worked on many different engine types, but I had never seen a sparkplug act so well, yet didn't let the engine run.

So loaded up and headed to Gorman. Had a great time, but on the next to last day, my daughter and I went for a long journey in the HH. We really put it though the paces, and were gone for almost 3 hours. Wide open sand washes, tight almost single track, you name it. However, the first thing that reared its head, was that after going into reverse, it wouldn't shift into forward. I carry tools, so I dropped the idle to see if that would help (nope). At one point, we were afraid that we would have to limp back to camp in reverse. Finally got it into forward and started back, (I could use some tips on this, it's an external reverse).

Then heading home, we had a long uphill pull to go up. We could see camp and it was about 40' to our turn off when the engine started losing power and died. Jumped out and started looking for problems. Didn't see anything, so jumped in and tried it. It fired went about 6' and died. It acted like it was running out of fuel. So we sat for a couple of minutes, fired it up and creped towards the turn off (multiple times). Finally once we made the turn off, it was down hill to the camp, and once the HH fired, it ran fine back to camp.

So I ASSUMED that the problem was with the new manual petcock, not letting enough fuel through, so I pulled the fuel filter off and just ran a straight gas line. The next day, me and my son took off. We got about a mile from camp, and on an uphill it did the same thing. This time the starter went click. I jumped out and tried jumping across the solenoid - no good. Luckily we were by a camping area, so I was able to get a jump - still no good. So I figured I toasted the starter. I always carry a tow rope and the person that jumped me gave me a tow back to camp.

Back at camp, I pulled the starter, and it spun fine, so I pulled the fan housing off, and it looks like I seized a piston (can rock the crank, but that's it). All in all a fun trip, however, when trouble shooting NEVER ASSUME ANYTHING